It will be as well to give a few phrases and expressions, taken at random from the various volumes, to illustrate the elaborate felicity of phrase and epithet which are characteristic of the patient art of Mr. Gosse. We have the "boisterous bee," the "velvet darkness of the pines," the "horizon's primrose bar," the "night and her innumerable eyes" the "hushed elbowof the reedy leas" where the heron finds peace, the "bales of solid sleep" in which the opium is packed, the loadstone cliff at which "the fluttering magnets leap with lying poles," the "tight curls closing like the marigold," of the young athlete, the eye of the woodman that flickers "keen as the flashing of a snipe through beds of windless rushes." The poet passes the charcoal-burner's hut and says: "I love to watch the pale blue spire His scented labour builds above it." In the June garden he notes "how spring and summer flowers arrange Their aromatic interchange." He hears "the small hushed cry of crisp dry life The terebinth gives beneath the graver's knife." To the pushing iris he cries, "What news from hollow worlds beneath?" He sees, on a Provençal coast, "Where now the prickly cactus gibes and crawls Down towards cold waves from firm rock-battlements." He watches the expiring light: "As ceases in a lamp at break of day The fragrant remnant of memorial flame." He hears in passing "Joybells of some exuberant town at play." He indicates in a stroke of rare insight the characteristic failure of the melancholy Obermann, his "high lassitude," and for a delicate simile what could be more perfect than the following:—
As on the pale white peacock we discernThe pencilled shadows of the rainbow dyesAnd coloured moons that on her sisters burn.
All this is the purest literary workmanship. There is nothing of the impressionist here. There is no dim vagueness, but the effect is noted and carefully transferred to words of infinite associations. The possible weakness of this delicate minuteness is that here and there in a moment of strenuous action, when the march of the poem ought to proceed with swift directness, the glancing eye is apt to turn aside or lose itself in detail. One small instance will be enough of a tendency that is as a rule successfully combated. In the "Cruise of the Rover," in the heat of movement, when the young English sailors after their desperate fight are being dragged to judgment, drink is given them from "a great cool earthen firkin." Now this is just such a detail as no one at such a moment should have had leisure or inclination to note, and this is the fault of the literary method. In meditative poems, in transcripts from nature, the more sensitive the eye is to external impressions the more intimate and lucid will the emotion be. But not in the ballad, not in the poem of action and life. And this is true of such narratives as the "Island of the Blest" and the "Death of Arnkel," where detail is almost too tyrannous, closely and vividly sketched as it is.
In the former poem such descriptions as that of the Island itself may be noted for their proportion:—
And now beneath the magic Isle we came:Full of fair havens was it, blue and wideWith iron promontories, fit to tameThe wildest storm and make a calm inside,Where gentlest birds might plume themselves and ride.White cities nestled under every hill,Stretching their marble feet to touch the tide,And shallops driven by more than mortal skillMeandered here and there, or cleft the wave at will.Down coverts, thick with cedar and with pine,Sonorous waters dropt their silver shafts.
This is the perfection of stately narrative. But when the mariners are led away for trial in "quaint procession" and "bound three by three in chaplets of wild rose," we pass into a region of whimsical fantasy, into which a true narrative poet like William Morris has no tendency to err.
Firdausi in Exileis a story well told, and is the best narrative poem by Mr. Gosse. Yet even this leaves us convinced that he is pre-eminently a lyric poet, the singer of a swift and passing mood; he has none of the sustained energy of the epic poet, nor the penetrating psychology of the dramatist.
The tragedy ofKing Erik, as Mr. Theodore Watts points out in the admirable critical note which is prefixed to the later edition, is not an acting play; the essence of an acting play is that it should pass firmly from situation to situation. But there is a further defect than even that.From a literary point of view, the images, the metre, the language are skilfully enough handled but the characters lack consistent vitality. King Erik passes from being an elevated, almost superior philosopher into an outrageous Othello, in a manner which, though possibly lifelike, is inconsistent with the dignity of his professions; he is not sincere in his utterances, if his jealousy is so easily awakened and so hardly allayed. And there is a similar want of humanity in many of the characters. Botilda is too mild and tactless, Grimur too amorous, Adalbjörg too venomous. They do not seem to betray their characters so much as to be always keeping them in view. But after all, if Mr. Gosse's dramatic muse is too statuesque, why so are Mr. Swinburne's and Mr. Bridges', and the literary instinct can extract a continuous pleasure from the mellow sequence of line upon line.
As a specimen of pictorial art, fading softly into visionary dreams, we would select a very perfect lyric from Mr. Gosse's latest book entitled "Circling Fancies." The poet sits at night by the open window, under the acacia which scents the air, with a lighted lamp, to which the gauzy summer flies come thronging.
Around this tree the floating fliesWeave their mysterious webs of light;The scent of my acacia liesWithin the circle of their flight:They never perch, nor drop from sight,But, flashing, wheel in curves of air,As if the perfume's warm delightIn magic bondage held them there.I watch them till I half confoundTheir motions with these thoughts of mine,That no less subtle bonds have boundWithin a viewless ring divine;Clasped by a chain that makes no sign.My hopes and wheeling fancies live:Desires, like odours, still confineThe heart that else were fugitive.
The poem of "Tusitala" records Mr. Gosse's first meeting with Mr. R. L. Stevenson, four-and-twenty years ago, on a Scotch steamer. He goes on to speak of the novelist's growing fame, the train of suffering that conducted him to glory, his exile in the "ethereal musky highlands" of Samoa, "till," he says, "we almost deem'd you vanished."
Vanish'd? ay, that's still the trouble,Tusitala!Though your tropic isle rejoices,'Tis to us an Isle of VoicesHollow like the elfin doubleCry of disembodied echoes,Or an owlet's wicked laughter,Or the cold and hornèd gecko'sCroaking from a ruined rafter,—* * * *You are circled, as by magic,In a surf-built palmy bubble,Tusitala;Fate hath chosen, but the choice isHalf delectable, half tragic,For we hear you speak, like Moses,And we greet you back enchanted,But reply's no sooner grantedThen the rifted cloudland closes.
But the poem must be read in its entirety to give an idea of the delicate melody, the haunting pathos of the strain. It is a poem above praise.
Classification in poetry is a fruitless task, and it is impossible to do a poet a greater wrong than unnecessarily to seal him of a certain tribe; he must besui generis; many writers can imitate with singular felicity; Owen Meredith wrote lines which, if they had been written by Tennyson, would have been reckoned among his sweetest, but they were Owen Meredith and not Tennyson. So Mr. Stevenson in prose is responsible for a knot of ventriloquists who seem to speak with the authentic voice; the hands are the hands of Esau and the utterance is only not Esau's too.
Mr. Gosse is an obsequious follower of none. He has little in common with our pre-eminent lyric lord, Mr. Swinburne; Mr. Swinburne is a rhapsodist, who has made such stately and exhaustive use of the rare dactylic element in English that it is hard to see how any dactylic poetry should in future be cast in any different mould. Mr. Morris israconteurfirst; his ancient tales create their form, and ornament is accessory to narrative. These are the two great planets of our firmament, but there are other stars of brilliant and individual fire.
Mr. Austin Dobson is the soul of exquisitefinesse, but the fine, careless rapture he does not claim. Mr. Kipling comes like an explorer laden with strange spoils from an unvisited land, but whether any one may tread in his footsteps is uncertain; it is uncertain, too, whether he has triumphed over or through his environment, and Mr. Gosse has little in common, save his generous admiration, with a poet starred and crowned with gems that all the world before him had conspired to cheapen. Mr. Stevenson, in poetic quality among the greatest, is reticent and will not speak—poignant sincerity is perhaps his most moving characteristic; Mr. Patmore strikes an old, full-flavoured note, in the region of happy homely courtesies—though in the "Unknown Eros" he has once or twice fused the precision of George Herbert with the dignity of Gray. But Mr. Gosse, the Epicurean in the House, would haunt the library rather than the dining-room.
Mr. George Meredith in his gorgeous lyrics strikes the nail too often and too hard, until he dints the panelling. Could he only hold his hand! On any given subject he will breed you a round dozen of stanzas, large and over-ripe, to one more acid berry. Mr. Bridges, the sober, majestic lyrist, with his grave russet effects, his almost stilted dignity, is the one writer, next to the two fixed stars, to whom we are disposed to give unstinted praise for his solemn reticence, hisstrong, full music; and to him Mr. Gosse must yield the palm in verse; Mr. Bridges has behind him the force of woodland seclusion and the unique devotion of a strong spirit to a slender art, while Mr. Gosse has social claims, artistic and literary criticism, poetical and historical exegesis, and almost unrivalled biographical gifts to drain his spirit. Mr. Watson in his best poetical work is the sublimation of the philosophical critic of poets. For Matthew Arnold, Shelley, Tennyson, Wordsworth, he has done, we think, what Milton did for "Lycidas," and it is impossible to believe that such cool and spacious writing can ever be superseded. Mr. Austin, like Mr. Gosse, is penetrated with Virgil's "inglorious passion for stream and wood." Mr. Aubrey de Vere is the poet of secluded grace, monastic thrills; Lord De Tabley goes to and fro, like Circe, before his stately loom: Mr. Lang is as his own porcelain, foam frozen into crystal. Among younger writers, Mr. Le Gallienne has the elfish voice of a spirit, airy, whimsical, but full of rapturous phrases; Mr. Yeats the eerie wailing of the winds in a haunted Celtic twilight; yet of these two, so essentially spiritual, it is hard to predict anything—like the wind, their prototype, they blow whither and whence they will. But these both are, so to speak, on the tree-tops, while Mr. Gosse treads the earth. Mr. Henley, again, in some of his vehement, rough lyrics, reachesa poignant fervour of which our graceful bard knows nothing. Lastly, among the undoubted chiefs of song, must be mentioned Miss Rossetti, with whose tender, remorseful, almost conventual outlook Mr. Gosse has no common fibre. No greater contrast could indeed be devised, for Miss Rossetti is at heart adévoteand Mr. Gosse a pagan.
It is hard to speak of Mr. Gosse only as a poet without reference to his prose writings, where, indeed, he displays even a more subtle mastery of his art. But we should characterise him as a delicate, impassioned singer of some of the sweetest moods of life. In the fiercer and darker regions of the soul he does not love to linger; in his passion he is, so to speak, anchored safely to life—he is not whirled away in the eddies of elemental seas, with the wild energy that we see, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë's work. In the utmost abandonment of love or sorrow he is conscious of the red moon in the poplar, and the subtle scent of briar and honeysuckle; his feet are on the earth, and almost the deepest pang that he feels is when his jaded senses refuse to respond to the thrill that earth and sky are wont to awaken in him. With man in the abstract he has little sympathy; in the individual the keenest and most intimate delight. He is not the poet of movements; he has no wish to transcribe in verse the economical solutions of poverty. And, lastly, heresolutely lives in a region of sensuous, though pure, delight; he turns aside into the glade when the tainted air warns him that he is near some difficult horror on which he would not gaze. He has none of the impulse of the philosophers to see life steadily and see it whole, and if there is any note of timidity in the poems, we should ascribe it to the author having shunned, or rather missed,the descent into hellwhich we are inclined to believe necessary for the highest artistic development. Each poet, each man, has his own hell, in which some brief sojourn is necessary if he is to test the seriousness of life and art. Mr. Gosse gives us no hint that this article is included in his creed; we cannot wish that he should be forced to include it, but we say that it is the conscious lack of this experience alone which has kept him from laying claim to the highest glories of song. Delicacy rather than intensity, that is the keynote of his lyrics.
In an exquisite epistle lately addressed by Mr. Austin Dobson to Mr. Gosse, he speaks of himself and his friend as moving in the procession of art "where is not first nor last." "At least," he claims, "we have handed on the fire." We dare not expect all things from each man; but to have made some exquisite mood your own, and to have presented it with passionate accuracy, is no light achievement.
1894.
LITERATURE, so long as it be idealistic, is the anodyne of the spirit, the mother of faith, the nurse of hope! Literature records and criticises, but does not make history: as we grow older we have to recognise, slowly and sadly, the fact that the world is profoundly incomplete. The more that we can keep our eyes from a vain attempt to plumb the abyss, the more useful, practical, hopeful we become. And literature, like society, athletics, politics, is one of the devices we resort to, to hide from ourselves the horror of the gap. But the only true consolation is our faith in the incompleteness of the world as we see it, and in the ultimate completeness of the Divine plan. Realistic literature can never help us to this faith: it can only plunge us deeper in the mire—deeper in fact than we need be plunged, because realism deludes us into accepting as typical what is only abnormal.
The Realist is a man who stands beside a drag-net that is being slowly hauled ashore. He picks up and handles, not without a sickly creepof horror, the viscous fleshy things, clammy polypi, bulging, translucent cucumber-objects smelling of the peevish brine. They are struggling, heaving, dying; on them, on these creatures of the silent, moving sea, settles the nauseating faintness of the unsubstantial air. Such pleasure as they give him is horrible, physiological, almost obscene.
But the Idealist, to use an exquisite simile of Mr. Henry James' in "The Middle Years," is the man who visits "the great glazed tank of art." There in the vivarium, through the glimmering panes, under the loops and lines of light, and among the bursting bubbles, on the dim sand, in dusky corners, on jutting shelves of the rock, the strange sea-monsters, all humps and horns, lie at their ease. Strange they are and horrible; but it is a cleanly, a spectacular horror. They are quiet, they are at home. They twiddle their mandibles, they rise and walk, with clumsy groping motions. But there is no vile invasion: they are safe behind the crystal wall.
It is thus that I have tried to show my own gallery of persons. I have not burrowed into their secrets, or tried to nose out scandals. Beyond their studies I have not followed them. There has been none of that "ripping up, like pigs," which Lord Tennyson so forcibly deprecated. I have tried to respect the reticences of these persons, their concealments, their caprices.They are not sliced into sections and bottled, but sketched with what would fain be a careful and affectionate hand.
We can never see too much of desirable people. Though my heroes did not all deal with life in a sharp, business-like way, making the most of its pleasures, and shirking its pains, yet they lived and wrote with dignity.
Dignity! That is the saving quality! No matter how mean the surroundings, how squalid the furniture of life, dignity is always possible, always desirable. Victor Hugo's old rag-picker, cataloguing the horrors she disinterred, with her plate, her pot, her basket, respected herself and her calling, and thought her disposition of scraps worthy of interested description.
Only, our dignity must not be a mere mask; it must not be studied for itself; it must not be a robe sedulously arranged over a skeleton; but it must be the outer radiance of truth and hope and courage. For of all fates the most deplorable is, as the wise Greek said, to be opened and found empty.
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